Loyalty
It comes to the door alone,
it’s bark pale in the rain.
Or it climbs in through a window
and wanders around the house, lonely,
while a log burns on the hearth.
When we sleep, like a lonely shadow
it sifts through splinters and ash
looking for the one lost.
Return
Maybe, in a
year, you’ll return to me more kind,
or more
beautiful in three,
or a more
complete woman in five.
Or maybe, in ten
years, you’ll return
like my life’s
work—coming
by post one morning—
that I’ll read
once, and then twice,
but will never
write again.
Azrael
1.
When we finally meet I won’t rebuke you,
won’t say: You are late
or be selfish and say:
You could
have easily waited three more days
as there are
so many others alive around you.
What could three more days mean
as you’d be coming for me then?
When we meet I won’t rebuke you.
I’ll be turning the page
and folding up the past
as if I were not part of it.
2.
You didn’t visit
my grandmother
who waited for
you on the doorstep.
Or my
grandfather
who went to more
than one war to meet you—
you never
humbled yourself, reaching out a hand to him
to offer even a
single wound.
But you came for
my small brother
who wondered if
mother is all white inside,
like her breast
milk.
Though we never
once mentioned your name
in front of him.
3.
Each night you
calmly pass by the graves,
looking in on
the dead like a mother,
lullabying them,
promising that their loved ones
will be along
soon!
Ibrahim Nasrallah — winner of numerous poetry awards and the
International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018 — was born in 1954 in the Al
Wehdat refugee camp in Jordan, where his parents had taken refuge in 1948,
after being evicted from their land in Al-Burayi, Palestine. He lived in the
camp for thirty-three years, attending the school sponsored by the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), and later
studying at the UNRWA Teacher Training College in Amman, beginning his career
as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked as a
journalist and museum curator until 2006, when he dedicated his life to
writing. To date, he is the author of 15 books of poems and 22 novels. Books of
translations of his work have been published in English, Persian, Italian,
Spanish, Danish and Turkish.
Omnia Amin earned her PhD in modern and contemporary English literature from Queen Mary University of London. She is an author, translator, and professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai, UAE.
Amin and London are co-translators of Now, As You Awaken, by Mahmoud Darwish (Sardines Press, 2007); Rain Inside, by Ibrahim Nasrallah (Curbstone Books, 2009); and The Novel, by Nawal El Saadawi (Interlink World Fiction, 2009).
